"Defending the Free Market: the Moral Case for a Free Economy"

My new book has been released. You may purchase your copy at Amazon and book sellers everywhere. Here are a few kind words from others:

“I’ve been eagerly anticipating such a book from Father Sirico for a long time. The man has delivered magnificently. Defending the Free Market does more than the title suggests. It celebrates the miracle of freedom and points a lost generation back to the free and virtuous society.”
—Lawrence Kudlow, anchor of CNBC’s The Kudlow Report

“Father Robert Sirico is a voice who must be heard. Defending the Free Market provides a solidly Christian perspective on capitalism and free markets—and makes the compelling case that we cannot possibly understand economics and how markets function without understanding the true nature of man.”
—Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship® and the Colson Center for Christian Worldview

"I've been doing financial counseling and education for over two decades, and one thing that has always stood out to me is how much money is connected to every part of our lives, from relationships to politics to ministry. Money is never just about money; it's always just part of the issue. That's why I appreciate Father Robert Sirico's ministry. Sure, he talks about money, but he also shows how all of these different aspects of our lives interact with and impact each other."
—Dave Ramsey, New York Times best-selling author and nationally syndicated radio show host

Prayers for Chuck Colson

Friends and supporters of the Acton Institute will want to know that our dear friend and collaborator Chuck Colson, Prison Fellowship Ministries founder, is recovering well from a surgery that removed a blood clot from his brain Saturday morning. I recently spoke with Rev. Jim Liske, CEO of Prison Fellowship, and he asks for our prayers.

 

Please join me and the staff of the Acton Institute in offering earnest prayer for Chuck’s well-being and full recovery and also that the comfort of the Holy Spirit would surround his wife Patty and the entire ministry of Prison Fellowship in this time of difficulty. That this should occur during the very week most of the Christian world commemorates our Lord’s own passion for our redemption is not without meaning, and is an assurance that God remains, as always, in control.

My Latest Op/Ed in the WSJ

In the Wall Street Journal, I look at the recent “note” on economics released this week by the Vatican. The document, titled “Toward Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of a Global Public Authority,” was published with an eye toward the upcoming G-20 meeting in Cannes, France, on Nov. 3-4. This 18-page document has, Rev. Sirico observes, “been celebrated by advocates of bigger government the world over.”

But what’s missing from the popular analysis is that the Vatican document “embraces a sound economic theory concerning the cause of the world financial crisis: the breakdown of the postwar Bretton Woods monetary system and the unleashing of fiat currencies and central-bank printing presses.”

Here I am:

We went from a hard-money regime, in which there were restrictions on the power of central banks and financial institutions to create money and credit, to one where money became purely paper. There were no restrictions remaining on the power of governments to finance unlimited debt. Banks could create credit seemingly without limit. Central banks became the real power in the world economy.

None of this was true under a gold standard. That system limits the expansion of credit by an indelible physical fact. There was a limit, a check, a rule that went beyond the whim of financial masters and politicians. The Vatican seems to understand this.

But discerning the disease and finding the cure are very different undertakings, and here the document falls short. It imagines a new world central bank and political authority that will rule without “any partial vision or particular good” but rather seek “the common good.” Its decisions should “be made in the interest of all, not only to the advantage of some groups, whether they are formed by private lobbies or national governments.”

Somehow, with an intelligence never before discovered in government bureaucracies, these proposed global authorities would create “socio-economic, political and legal conditions essential for the existence of markets that are efficient and efficacious.”

Read “The Vatican’s Monetary Wisdom” on the website of the Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203554104576655052604890180.html.

Jobs & Deficits - The Moral Equation

My column in today’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

Jobs & deficits — the moral equation

By Rev. Robert A. Sirico

Thursday, September 15, 2011

The Genesis account of creation tells us that from the beginning, humanity was created to work. God puts Adam in the garden to "work and watch over it." The Scripture provides an insight into our nature: We are all, man and woman, called into this life to find our vocation, the work that is uniquely ours and contributes to the flourishing of the wider community.

This explains why we are naturally so troubled about what appear to be merely economic problems: intractable unemployment and the various schemes put forth by policy makers to spur job creation. But behind the question is the reality that we naturally prefer people to be productive contributors to our economic life.

How we accomplish that is the subject of the debate over our unsustainable budget and debt trajectory. Do we choose those policies that make room for more freedom in the market, unleashing the creative potential of the American worker, business owner and entrepreneur? Or do we default, once more, to political and bureaucratic measures that require heavier burdens of taxation and regulation?

A government that actively sustains poverty by removing natural incentives to work is gravely in the wrong. Such government is without its essential anchor, which is that understanding of humanity as creative and productive.

The super committee created by Congress' debt-ceiling compromise has begun its work to find $1.5 trillion in federal spending cuts ($2 trillion if the committee accepts the cuts corresponding to President Obama's proposed stimulus). Even after this reduction, though, the nation's debt will be unacceptably burdensome.

In 2011, for the first time since World War II, the amount of our total federal debt will surpass annual GDP. This is perilous, because economic capacity begins to be seriously affected when a country's debt reaches 80 percent of GDP.

The super committee should begin by cutting social programs that perpetuate cycles of poverty. The only way to rise from poverty is to contribute to economic activity -- a job is the best poverty program ever devised.

The federal government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars in the "War on Poverty" since Lyndon B. Johnson declared it, but we have next to nothing to show for the expense. And the agenda put forward by the religious left devalues the human person, treating the poor as objects of charity rather than as economic contributors.

The federal government does have real obligations to current generations that must be met. But without substantive reform of our largest entitlement programs, the country's long-term fiscal health cannot be secured.

We cannot leave future generations with the full burden of our debt, which becomes a heavier weight the longer it is left unaddressed.

Congress must remember that economic growth is driven by innovations -- by improvements in how the population produces goods and delivers them. The incentives caused by an expanding government run counter to economic growth because they run counter to human nature.

As reform of federal spending is undertaken, all cuts must be made with an eye to freeing citizens of every class to pursue their economic potential -- to engage in the kind of dignified work that is essential to our nature, properly understood.

The Rev. Robert A. Sirico is president of the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Mich. He is delivering a luncheon lecture today at the Duquesne Club.

The Paper Pope

I have said it many times in the past, but now I have confirmation: According to the editors of the New York Times, the Pope is not permitted to make moral judgments because only the Editorial Board of the New York Times (all genuflect here) is permitted to pontificate:

“Ms. Abramson, 57, said that as a born-and-raised New Yorker, she considered being named editor of The Times to be like “ascending to Valhalla.”

“In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion,” she said. “If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth.”

Related: The NYT as religion

Not Whether to Help the Poor, But How

The debate over the application of the core teachings of the Christian faith began when Jesus was presented with a Roman coin containing Caesar’s image. In that moment, the Lord drew both a limitation to the legitimate power of the state and a distinction between it and the supreme authority of Almighty God. What would unfold over the years following was a highly balanced and well thought-out hierarchy of values rooted in a core understanding of the dignity of the human person. Yet it was not so abstract a set of principles as to be incapable of providing guidance for concrete policy recommendations that nonetheless do not collapse dogmatic and unchangeable doctrine into the dynamic stuff of politics and policies.

 

Along this circuitous route to a more balanced set of principles, there have been dead ends and extremes from which the Church has pulled her faithful: the medieval Spiritualist Franciscan (i fraticelli) who wanted to ban private property as intrinsically evil, or, more recently, the Liberation Theologians who attempted to “collapse the eschaton” of the Kingdom of God into socialist revolution.

 

Yet the incarnation of Christ does not let the Christian off the hook when it comes to our beliefs about human dignity and the practical protection of the vulnerable. Understanding how to translate the social implications of the gospel into workable and concrete solutions is at times as frustrating and ambiguous as understanding the homoousian clause of the Creed.

 

Let us take the recent occasions of public discourse by Catholics on these matters occasioned by an open letter issued by a group of Catholic professors, which argues that the budget proposed by House Republicans violates Catholic social teaching, and in which they come close to calling the Speaker of the House a heretic.

 

There is evidence in this letter, and in some of the commentary surrounding it, of a failure to grasp the necessary distinctions in Catholic moral theology (of which, as the popes have noted, the social teaching is a branch). I pointed out in my original critique of the open letter that the Catholic professors’ statement neglected the important distinction between “non-negotiable dogmas and doctrines” and the “prudential and debatable give and take when it comes to applying the principles of Catholic social teaching.” Then I cited the Compendium of the Social Doctrine: “The Church’s Magisterium does not wish to exercise political power or eliminate the freedom of opinion of Catholics regarding contingent questions” (571).  The use of the phrase “contingent questions” in the Compendium is quite deliberate. It means that it is simply inaccurate to say that Catholics who debate how to address poverty dissent from the Church’s teaching in the same way as someone who does not support the Church’s insistence on legal protection for the unborn.

 

Some Catholic commentators reject this point, offering in defense a quotation from Caritas in Veritate: “Clarity is not served by certain abstract subdivisions of the Church’s social doctrine, which apply categories to Papal social teaching that are extraneous to it…. There is a single teaching, consistent and at the same time ever new.”

 

Benedict’s point here is that the Church’s teaching in the moral realm is one consistent body of thought. It is not a hodgepodge of policy concerns, among which Catholics may pick and choose along the lines of the fashionable Cafeteria Catholicism. The Church’s solicitude for the poor, the marginalized, the unborn, and the elderly is all of a piece. In that sense, the critique is correct: A Catholic cannot subordinate “justice issues” to “life issues”; he must embrace the Church’s teaching as a whole, because life issues are justice issues.

 

Yet the distinction holds. This is not because “justice issues” are less important than “life issues,” but because they are fundamentally different — a difference rooted in two millennia of Catholic moral reflection. Abortion involves the direct and intentional destruction of an innocent human life. It is never permissible intentionally to choose evil. Laws that permit abortion are inherently unjust, and Catholics are obligated to work toward legal prohibition of abortion.

 

When it comes to doing good, however, which is what addressing poverty entails, the Church does not stipulate exactly how such good is to be done. Helping the poor requires a different sort of moral analysis — not because I (or the Church’s teaching) am “dualist,” as some critics suggest, nor because assisting the poor is “less important” than protecting the unborn, but because the two issues possess different characteristics and therefore require different sorts of moral analysis.

 

This distinction holds, for example, outside the realm of the Church’s social teaching and can be seen in her teaching on the moral manner in which life is conceived. A superficial criticism of the Church’s stance against artificial contraception says, “Why is it wrong to avoid conception by the use of chemicals or condoms, but not immoral when using natural family planning methods?” The error in this argument is the same one made by the critics to whom I am responding: In the former case, an evil means is being chosen (the action to chemically prevent conception, for example), rather than refraining from doing good at a given time (actions leading to conception). It is not a sin to refrain from choosing from all the many goods available; it is always a sin to intentionally choose to do evil.

It is possible to argue that cutting welfare programs is consistent with Catholic social teaching, because we may choose from the various options available to us to do good by evaluating them in the hierarchy of goods. It will not do to fling citations of social encyclicals at each other on this point. Certainly there are passages that could be found to support increased government activity in the economy and provision of social services — when necessary to serve the common good. But there are also passages that suggest decreased government activity and withdrawal from social services (i.e., critiques of bureaucracy and calls for more vigorous private charity). Whether a particular situation — in this case, the budget battle in the United States in the year 2011 — calls for one or the other is manifestly a prudential question about which Catholics may disagree.

 

At the root of the incredulity and exasperation of some Catholics who mix fair arguments with vitriol is an incapacity to recognize that we really believe that many government programs aggravate rather than ameliorate poverty and other social ills. Rather than debating the prudence of the policies at hand, detractors resort to ad hominem attacks and pronounce anathemas selectively. Yet there is by this time a vast literature on the damage wrought by the war on poverty and its failure to achieve its goals. Such critics can continue to believe that shoveling government money into welfare programs discharges Catholic social teaching’s obligation to assist the poor if they wish, but their inability to see other views as reasonable, at least, is distressingly myopic.

 

A Catholic may not disregard the Church’s teaching to assist the poor and vulnerable; to do so would be to neglect the words and example of Christ Himself. It would be, in effect, to deny the Faith. But on the question of how best to fulfill that obligation, Catholics will indeed disagree, and the Church does not teach that it must be otherwise. The same kind of latitude is not permitted when it comes to legal protection of the unborn. I do not believe that this is “my view” of the matter; it is the mind of the Church, to which I hope my own mind is conformed.

 

This was published in Crisis Magazine on May 31, 2011.

Comments in Our Sunday Visitor

I recently commented in an article that appeared in Our Sunday Visitor about the relationship between the United States Catholic Church leaders and institutions with their employees. The article provides a few historical examples, including the 1949 gravediggers strike in New York.

Unions, yes. But when the Church is employer?

By Brian Fraga
Despite Catholic teaching on workers’ rights to organize, U.S. Church leaders and institutions have often had a history of strained relationships with their employees, in some cases busting unions and intimidating workers into silence, say labor movement experts.

One of the most notorious cases cited by scholars occurred in 1949, when Cardinal Francis Spellman, then the archbishop of New York, used seminarians to break a strike by low-paid gravediggers at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, N.Y.

Cardinal Spellman blamed communist agitators for influencing the workers. Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, which supported the gravediggers, wrote a letter to the cardinal, whom she said had been “ill-advised” and exercised “so overwhelming a show of force against a handful of poor working men.”

Battling unions 

That episode was not an isolated incident of Church-sanctioned union busting, and marked a troubling shift in Catholic employer-worker relations, according to Joseph J. Fahey, director of labor studies at Manhattan College in New York.

Fahey told Our Sunday Visitor that a lack of knowledge about Catholic social teaching among Church leaders and the removal of religious sisters and priests from the day-to-day operations of institutions have enabled anti-union sentiments.

“In the hospitals, laypeople have been hired to run the hospitals who often come from secular business environments,” Fahey said. “And what businesses do is fight unions.”

There are several recent examples of Catholic-labor tensions. In 2008, now-retired Bishop Joseph F. Martino of Scranton, Pa., unilaterally de-certified the Scranton Diocese Association of Catholic Teachers, the union that represented diocesan educators for 30 years.

Bishop Martino replaced the union with a diocesan-managed employee relations program that the union head called a “company union.”

When the union appealed to the Vatican, it ruled that Bishop Martino did not violate civil or Church law, and that unions are not the only way to guarantee dignity and justice for employees. The diocese then issued a statement noting that the decree “refutes what some people have erroneously charged: that Bishop Martino was violating Church teaching or social doctrine regarding labor unions.”

Last year, the National Labor Relations Board called upon Borgess Medical Center, located in Kalamazoo, Mich., to appear before a hearing after the Michigan Nurses Association accused Borgess of trying to bust the union. Borgess, a member of Ascension Health Network, the largest U.S. Catholic health-care chain, reached a contract earlier this year with the nurses union, which withdrew its unfair labor practice complaint.

Health care flash point 

Sister Monica McGloin, a Dominican Sister of Hope who is also a member of the Cincinnati Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, told Our Sunday Visitor that “the record was poor” for Catholic-labor relations.

“I think that, especially in Catholic health care institutions, we have seen a long-running resistance allowing staff members to vote on unions,” Sister McGloin said.

“I was involved in a project in Michigan last summer where we were hosting a faith delegation to hear from people in the Catholic health care system. It became very clear from the conversations that there were union-busting activities.”

Fahey said Catholic social teaching is unequivocal in saying that labor unions are an indispensable part of social justice in that they protect workers’ rights, guarantee their freedom to associate while fostering subsidiarity and solidarity.

Fahey argues that Catholic employers have increasingly developed an anti-union animus, in many cases even contracting “union avoidance firms” that boast of their ability to keep unions out of the workplace.

But Father Robert Sirico, president of the free-market think-tank, the Acton Institute, said there is a popular distortion about how Catholic social teaching views unions. Even in the 1949 gravedigger strike, Father Sirico said, Cardinal Spellman acted only after the union had already rejected a 3 percent raise offer. There were also 1,000 bodies waiting to be buried in the cemetery. “This should be a clear example of the legitimacy of breaking a strike,” he said.

Father Sirico said that if there is any problem in the Church institutions’ dealings with workers, it is that employees are often kept on even if their performance is deleterious to the mission. He said it is incumbent upon Church administrators to make efficient use of their money since the faithful has entrusted them with those resources.

‘Conflict and contention’ 

Fahey said that Church-affiliated schools, hospitals and social service institutions have increasingly cracked down on unionizing attempt since the Cardinal Spellman episode.

Years of constant hostilities surrounding workers’ attempts to unionize at Catholic hospitals led the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2009 to publish a document, titled “Respecting the Just Rights of Workers: Guidance and Options for Catholic Health Care and Unions,” meant to provide guidelines for fair labor negotiating processes.

The document called for Catholic hospitals to not use “traditional anti-union practices,” such as employing union-busting firms, while requesting that unions not adopt public campaigns for leverage in negotiations.

The bishops wrote: “We all know that there can be risks in dialogue. ... But some instances of conflict and controversy surrounding Catholic health care and labor have diminished Catholic values, health care ministry, the labor movement and our common commitment to a fair and just workplace.

“None of us — Catholic health care, the labor movement, or the Church — has been well served by the status-quo with all of its conflict and contention.”

Sister McGloin said the bishops’ guidelines were observed in January when 6,500 hospital workers of Ohio-based Catholic Healthcare Partners voted against unionizing.

“They had a process where neither the union or the institution interfered,” she said.